Barbell Shrugged - Muscle Analytics for Human Performance w/ Dr. Doug Goldstein, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #795

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Founder, Altitude Performance & Measured Motion Former two‑sport collegiate athlete turned board‑certified orthopedic specialist, Dr. Goldstein blends lab‑grade muscle science with hands‑on care. After earning his DPT from the University of Colorado and completing both an orthopedic residency and fellowship, he launched Altitude Performance, a concierge practice devoted to sport‑specific rehab and performance optimization. His newest venture, Measured Motion, pushes the field forward by studying muscle architecture, pennation angles, fascicle length, and refining intramuscular dry‑needling techniques. As Senior Advisor for Performance & Development at Springbok Analytics, Doug converts 3‑D muscle‑health data into actionable plans for clients across all ages and abilities. He also shapes the next generation of clinicians as affiliate faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s PT program and mentor to orthopedic fellows. Trusted by athletes across the PGA, LPGA, USWNT, NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, and MLB, Doug turns research into real‑world results. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Doug Goldstein on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug Family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Doug Goldstein is coming into the podcast and he is not only a member of the Rapid Health Optimization team, but he also works with a company called Springbok Analytics that is doing an enormous amount of research on muscle science, muscle analysis. In a sense, you go and get a big MRI

and they tell you in depth, like more depth than any other company I've ever heard of, what is going on with the imbalances in your body, how that can, where the root causes of those imbalances could be coming from and a whole bunch of other stuff that we're gonna dig into on the show today

and it's actually really funny because I talked to them about three years ago and didn't fully understand what they were doing. It's almost like I wish I had this podcast three years ago to be as excited about the product and the analysis that they do. Because when I talked to them, I was like, man, I don't know if I have like 40 minutes to go drive

to Duke to get this big thing done that I don't really understand. And then an hour later, after talking to Doug on this podcast, I was like, what an idiot I am. Why didn't I take them up on that opportunity? So now I'm gonna go get a springbok. We are going to in the future be going through my analysis

and the muscle and the makeup of that muscle. It's gonna be very cool. So as always friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larsen. Doug Goldstein. Welcome to the show, man. This is your first time hanging out with us. We've had you on the team here for a little while now. Very, very cool. I always think of shrugs,

like I have all these cool people in my circle, but none of them really, it doesn't really count until we do an episode of shrugs like I have all these cool people in my circle But none of them really it doesn't really count until we do a shit an episode of shrugs where we can just like sit down And talk about meathead stuff. It's like how you make it real. So now it's real today on barbell shrug we're gonna be talking about this really awesome thing called springbok that I actually know very little about because You want to hear the dumbest thing you could possibly do is when someone offers you a free spring box but you have to drive to Duke University to get it done and that's like a 40 minute drive from my house and I was like I don't think I need that I'm just I don't want to drive and then deal with Duke and all these and then turns out I would love to do it.

I was the opposite. I was like I will drive wherever I need to go. Let's do this. Getting me to like leave my house. It's not it's not the easiest thing in the world. So, but yeah, man, I'd love to dig into it. But kind of starting with your your background a little bit and how'd you get to working with them? Yeah. My training is in physical therapy. So did the entire pathway to get to where you're treating clinically and to condense everything. I think at some point during

anybody's clinical pathway, you start to realize there are things that insurance requires you to do and there are things that work a little better when you don't have to do them. So in that example, I had several pro-ath pro athlete patients early in my career that were dealing with hip injuries as an example. And their prior clinical histories that they had a right ankle in the case of a left hip issue, right ankle problems, Achilles' tears, massive sprains. And it starts to make you wonder about the connections between those two things, even though they're two physically different things. How does the foot influence the hip? How does the hip influence the foot?

And as you, you know, you learn more, right? You start to apply more, but then there's certain constraints that show up inevitably in an insurance-based practice, whether it be time spent with patient, sorry for the thumbs up there, but time spent with patient, or just inability to treat that

based on insurance restrictions and total visits received from a carrier. Yeah. What is Springbok? Like the company, the MRI process, like what, where, what's kind of like the, the, the history of the company and how did it get to kind of the, the states that it's at? Yeah. Springbok was a research based product out of the University of Virginia. So it started with Sylvia Blemker, who

was very interested in helping and leading the path on how do we start managing the volume of muscle? How do we measure the volume of muscle? And how does that volumetric measurement impact surgical decision making? In the back in the day, there were tendon lengthening procedures, these tendon lengthening procedures were designed to improve mobility, improve function. But in order to make sure that they were doing it correctly, they wanted to understand, is there an opportunity for this measurement to drive or support surgical decision making?

So they were looking at patients with neurodegenerative disorders, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, so forth. And it's completely progressed into this performance-based, on that continuum all the way from a disease state to a performance-based state, and everybody in between because your muscle size and your function have a relationship, right? They also measure things like the amount of intramuscular fat inside of your muscle versus a DEXA, which is more of an extra muscular measure of regional adiposity. So not that DEXA is bad, DEXA just provides one view into the system, whereas Springbok, I would say, provides a higher fidelity view into the intramuscular workings of a human.

The application of that we can dive into, but the application of that depends on the person. In Arite's, you know, the program for Arite, we're looking at how do we optimize whatever the client is looking for, whether it be a professional athlete or a person seeking optimal health. Every time when I was in undergrad, undergrad physiology, we talked about intramuscular fat. It was mostly referencing like type one muscle fibers and endurance training and things like that. But I remember in past conversations, you brought up that intramuscular fat

has been now correlated with injury risk, which I didn't expect you to say at the time. Can you talk more about that? How does that work? We wanna make sure we're very careful with that language because obviously the data that Springbok provides is not 100% indicative of an injury state

But if you talk about how springbok can be layered with subjective information from a patient as well as other factors The eccentric capacity of a muscle right the the literalist the literal ability for you to break and decelerate Depends on a couple different things right? How strong is that muscle? How fatigable is that muscle? The intramuscular fat has a bunch of medical literature around it that supports that muscles that are more fatty have the ability to produce less force. Now that doesn't mean to that earlier statement, it produces less force at the beginning of a competition, or it produces less force at the end of a competition. But what we do know

is that fat has some correlation to the ability for a muscle to perform optimally. Is that similar to saying that a muscle that has a lot of intramuscular fat, like if you're just looking at like, you know, the soleus muscle as an example, like it's gonna have a lot of intramuscular fat because it's a high percentage of type one muscle fibers?

Not necessarily a high percentage of type one muscle fibers. We'll a high percentage of type one muscle fibers. We'll talk about two different ways to think about this. One would be spring box relationship to fascioscapulocumeral dystrophy. So FSHD for short. They're a large group of people in the world that deal with dystrophies.

And dystrophies are muscle wasting diseases where the muscle loses its quality over time. Fascioscapulocumeral dystrophy is just literally where we start to lose fat more in a certain region of the body, whereas a different type of dystrophy could be in a different way. But what we know is that there is a loss of force generation capacity in a muscle. And we know when we lose force, we lose the ability to function. And if you lose function, depending on the human and what they're looking for, that could

be as simple as not being able to get out of a chair. That could be even a little more in a performance way, inability to produce plantar flexion to your soleus comment, Doug, and driving accelerative capacity at a sport. A different group would be more of the really hardline medical literature that talks about lumbar multifidi. You guys familiar with the multifidi of the low back? No.

So, they did these studies early on, this is kind of early in my training, where they were looking at the intersegmental and intersegmental in this case like L5 multifidi, L4, L3 and looking at low back pain and patients with low back pain. And they started to make this connection to losing or loss of intersegmental control in instances of low back pain. But what we also saw through MRI was that there was this increase in fatty infiltrate in those muscles of those regions. And so these questions started becoming more mainstream of, do we have this strong understanding of how fat influences the force contraction

capacity of a muscle? And then going that next step further, which I think Arte does a good job, it's how do we take that information and apply it not necessarily in pain states, but even going as far as performance states. So that in that example, the fatty infiltration in multifidi leads to like a a lessening or decrease in lumbar stability, which leads to low back pain potentially. Thank you for saying the word potentially because I call these

landmines because when we I'm sure barbell shrug has a ton of different viewers with different backgrounds. And when I say the word landmine, I don't think we can be definitive and say, small muscle equals weak muscle muscle with more fat equals compensatory muscle. But again, we do know that yes, loss of stability has been correlated with increases in intramuscular fat at the lumbar multifidi. And more research is coming out, including what spring bucks doing with the NBA database, where they've now catalogued a bunch of players.

And we're looking at things like do hamstring strains occur with relationships to amounts of fat? Brian Heiderscheid's leading that charge from the University of Wisconsin. You'll circle back to that comment from earlier about the right ankle issue leading to left leg hip issues. Is that just compensation patterns that you're mostly referring to there? Or what are there? What are the mechanisms? I believe so. Yes. And the reason I say that is if I have

from do I have permission to share on this? Can I share screens here? Is this more just us talking or do we do we venture into the video version of this? This is an audio only show. But green share if that helps us have a better conversation. Okay, do you mind if I screen share and we'll keep the audio then that way to the viewers I'll explain as we go and we can understand this. Yeah, sure. Do you mind if I get a little?

There you go. Let me share this and I think this will help really drive the conversation. So to the viewers, what I've pulled up here is the spring buck analytics interactive viewer. And on the interactive viewer, Anders, I'll give you the fly by because it's kind of like, what does this mean to me and how does it work? Yeah. This kind of reinforces what you've already had a scan for.

We can talk about your scan as well. Sure. But when we look at the interactive viewer, you literally get a three dimensional representation. And they use the phrase digital twin because what you can see is this literal interactive viewer of the human couple things exist right now we're looking at an NFL athlete who sustained a hamstring strain. I'll show that in a second. But what we're really going to look at here is the literal left right asymmetry of the muscles. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've

probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Arate is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. Arate is something

completely different. Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arte isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best,

physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit aratelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab.com. Now, back to the show. And so Doug, to your question, you can see a 9.4 reduction, 9.4% reduction in size. So the volume of a muscle can be much smaller. And if you have that clinical history,

you can start to again, layer its potential relationship avoiding those landmines, but does it have a relationship to the pathology that's present? So in this case, this athlete, the season prior sustained a significant ankle injury that forced him to sit out six games in the NFL season. What we see here is again, a 9.4 reduction in his tibialis anterior. And since it's audio only, we're talking about the literal muscle that supports the breaking

or deceleration of the foot when we run. So think about a receiver who's running really fast 30 yards down the field and they need to put on the brakes to adjust to the ball or they need to put on the brakes to adjust to the routes of the quarterback and the receiver are synced up. If we go back to your comment Doug, I can't say that that reduction in size reduces the capacity to decelerate but there's a strong connection that muscles that don't have literal size or sarcomeres, and we can dive into that phrase more too, they lose ankle stability to your earlier comment about lumbar, and that reduces the overall performance,

which would theoretically create a compensation. Because if you, either of you probably had injuries where you felt not stable is the right word, but necessarily not producing as much force in a region. If the task is still to catch the ball in the case of the receiver, you're going to figure out how to catch the ball. And we know this about pro athletes. They are super compensators. They will complete the task. It's a matter of do they complete the task efficiently? And does that allow them to sustain themselves throughout a season? Mm hmm. So I'll pause there to make sure we kind of hit on that a little

more. Yeah, I believe I heard Gray Cook say after pre existing injury movement asymmetry is the number two predictor of injury. So so in this case, and again, to the audience, we're looking at like a 3d model of, of an athlete's lower body muscle mass, where we can see all the, all the quad muscles and what have you, and the muscle next to the shin bone in the, in the front of the lower leg, that when it contracts, kind of pulls the toe up is, if you say 9.4% smaller on this athlete.

So presumably this person's not going to be, not going to be in your, in your example, decelerating the same as each foot is contacting the ground. So he's going to be producing less force potentially on the left side and then having to absorb a little bit more force on the right side potentially. And that asymmetry over time where many games or many practices is leading to wear and tear that wouldn't be there otherwise. or many practices is leading to wear and tear that wouldn't be there otherwise. Yeah, well said. I don't want, would it be jumping too far ahead right now to ask

kind of along the lines of the recovery and when somebody is actually at 100% or ready to get back onto the field or is there more kind of data that you want to walk through specific to this one? Yeah, to those that are not seeing the screen, but here in the audio, this individual sustained a grade two hamstring on the left. And a grade two hamstring strain means that they tore enough fibers to create what's considered an ecomosis event, which you get that massive bruising that massive swelling, we literally a spring block can quantify that volume. So in this case, you can see how the intramuscular swelling is

at a certain level. In this case, one muscles at 75 milliliters and another muscles at 28 milliliters. Pro teams are using this Anders to your question about how do we use this as a mechanism of return to play or RTP? Well, if swelling is present, I think we're all pretty clear. There's something going on physiologically and pathologically that maybe needs to be resolved in order for them to feel like they can progress that athlete onto the field or court. So they sometimes use the swelling as a metric where they can literally see time points A, B, and C

at different points of time, and the reduction of swelling in literal volume of, in the milliliters of volume. So is return to play really the number one reason that pro sports teams are gravitating toward this data? We've seen a large interest there to begin with, but as these teams are ingesting this data and pairing it with their other metrics like functional periodic reporting and to that

they're looking at like a Nord board hamstring strength, a force plate, how much force are we producing? How even is that symmetry when we squat, for example. And then they're looking at those two in combination saying, well, their strength is going up and their swelling is going down. This athlete is on the field and performing with minimal subjective pain. Now we're seeing them feel more comfortable using the Springbok data as another layer to help support decision making. Yeah. Specifically, kind of in the return to play side of things, you know, there's tens of millions of dollars getting dumped into some of these athletes.

And now we have like a very quantifiable way of saying this person is, this athlete may be saying, I feel 100% and now you have this information saying, oh, you're not actually even close to 100%. Where do you kind of draw the line of, and this is specifically from you giving the nod of, yes, he's ready to go, or no, he's not ready to go. And what kind of call it like margin for error? Do you allow between where they are today and what 100% would actually look like?

It's a great question. And I really appreciate the way you tee that up as far as my decision making. Because let's be very clear, as an advisor to Springbok, I have the opportunity as a clinician who advises them versus an employee of, I want to make sure that Springbok is known as this objective data set, because they did receive FDA clearance for being an objective measurement of muscle. So the quality of the data is really good. But the

application from me, or let's say Doug is in charge of an MBA team strength and conditioning program and Anders, you're the medical director of a different team. Each of us looks through our own lens, but when this conversation becomes centered around a single point of truth, and when I say single point of truth, I mean spring box being a very solid objective measurement. Yeah. Doug, you're going to infiltrate and say this athlete is performing in the

weight room. They're passing all my tests. Those tests in this case could be Nord board strength of the hamstring sprinting capacity on a treadmill with good symmetry. Anders, you in the room are going to say, well, this athlete is having no pain with range of motion. I'm doing very table based assessments that equal no pain. that equal no pain, let's together make the decision. So I don't think any one person has a single emphasis on who dictates that decision. And we're seeing these teams, right, make team decisions, where the medical director, the strength conditioning coach, the PTs, the ATCs, all get to chime in and have a better understanding. So I don't have an answer to what's the margin for error. Because that depends on how much each

team member has in this how much say they have in this discussion. Yeah, I was gonna say what's what's kind of like the next phase of spring back here? I know, like any company, there's there's evolution and innovation over time with with cool products like this. And certainly, there'll be more and more, more and more dominoes will fall and it will improve over time. What's the direction it's going right now?

We're kind of the next phase has more data or can provide more insight that the current version doesn't quite yet do. NBA for example, it's a phenomenal question again. The NBA is now a database which is inside the Springbok system, which means we've taken the NBA combine athletes because the NBA is now a database was inside the spring box system, which means we've taken the NBA combine athletes, because the NBA is now a partner of spring box in multiple ways. And we're looking at the comparison of a more homogenous data set.

Because right now in its early days, if we wanted to compare Doug to a professional athlete, not that you're not a very good athlete, Doug, but let's be you know, really, Andrew, I appreciate the smirk, but like, there's a moment of let's be real with each other and say, where do we land? It depends. He's a black belt, but come on. That is a professional athlete. My five-year-old will be there too, one day. The reason I say that is- The Seinfeld where they have like the little kids in karate, and Kramer starts beating them up. You know you're 40 when you make Seinfelds where they have like the little kids in karate and Kramer starts beating them

up. You know you're 40 when you make Seinfeld references. Keep going. You're trying to compare pro athletes to other pro athletes in the general population. Is that kind of what you're getting at? It seems like a logical play for Springbok, right? And that's where I would say they're going down the more institutional pathway in the performance-based world where we're getting female athlete databases that are basketball

players, NBA basketball databases, soccer databases. As we continue to get these databases, now you can make decisions that are more consistent with the people they compete against. And that's a really great pathway for Springbok and the one that they're pushing very hard on. Matt Brown leads the charge with Springbok on the biz dev and sales side. He's made really great headway with the Major League Baseball organization as an example. Because in Major League Baseball, we don't really know why do pitchers have so much elbow pain. And I'm making that a very general statement, but we know

pitchers have elbow pain. And we know that's a huge risk for pitchers to reducing the longevity of their career. The MLB database is a full body database. So instead of on the screen looking at only the T12 muscles down, we're now expanding that optical view to look at the entire arm, neck muscles, chest, core. And again, more data that's completely objective in a very reliable way allows teams of people to make decisions that are more comprehensive and then that layering of decision-making creates a better opportunity for injury management. I don't want to say you're reducing

injuries because that feels like a landmine. You're not necessarily reducing injuries, you're giving data that can support the potential reduction of injury and helping teams make decisions by adding a layer of information. Yeah. So that by adding a layer of information. Yeah, so it was like a potential example there. It could be back to the pitching idea here. So you can take all the pitchers that have elbow pain, all pitchers that don't have elbow pain. If you had a spring block on all of them and you could very clearly see the pitchers that do not have elbow pain have lats that are 5% bigger than the pitchers that that do have elbow pain and and and the pitches that do have elbow pain. Their pecs are 10% bigger. So you can start

like finding all of these asymmetries and imbalances so to speak and you can point to well these guys don't have elbow pain so we can start tailoring training protocols to more more clearly match the people that are healthy with the injured population? You just defined a really great pathway for spring box usage inside the sports teams. Because that's exactly what could happen and is happening. I think we're going to see that pick up over time because like any data set, the more influx of data and the more people actively utilizing and thinking about the data, as well as collaborating. Because right now, unfortunately in sports, I've seen this siloing

effect where to your comment earlier, Doug, about you being in the strength side and Anders, you being on the medical, we need you guys to make sure you're talking well together, right? How do you guys make decisions for the athlete versus Anders only making a decision based on information from a treatment table. And Doug, you only making decisions based on a strength room. If we can combine those two, to drive a, again, a decision that pitchers need to have more optimal balance between the lats and pecs, not think that that's the answer. But if we can start to do that,

now these athletes are getting the effects of people talking about them in a more detailed and higher fidelity way. Yeah. How has the relationship with the athletes been in this? I can kind of see some of these athletes get like they go pro and they're the best player they've ever seen in their entire lives until they go pro and all of a sudden it's like oh I'm supposed to be thinking about things besides just playing basketball. I've always just played basketball and been the best and now all of a sudden they're seeing this like super deep dive into every muscle fiber and what that muscle is made out of.

Do most of them enjoy seeing this data or is this just so overwhelming? They don't know how to use it. What's been the response with the athletes? Yes, to all of the above. Yes, meaning athletes have come into the leagues that we've seen have been exceptional their entire life. And now they're playing amongst people that are more on their same level. And then there's an athlete in one case

who's seeking that little detail that gives them that small uptick in performance that correlates into a all pro season or an all star season in the NBA. But you're really hitting on a topic that's independent of any objective data regarding the MSK system. You're hitting on the aptitude and ambition of athletes, right? Does

this athlete have a level of engagement? If they do, in my practice and in the RSA program, I've seen this massive increase in engagement. And it's really awesome because if you can add more value by providing better data, you're giving them what they want, you're meeting them where they are. And we're also seeing that improvement in function, right? The several athletes that have done the Springbok analysis inside Aritae would tell you that pain is going down and strength is going up. That's not solely because of Springbok. That's because you have wonderful people on the Aritae team that are helping drive decisions regarding blood work, supplementation, sleep, all of the factors that are meant in that program. Yep.

You guys have one of our athletes that's been sidelined as a pitcher in the big leagues. It's been sidelined for like the last three years and came to us literally as like the very last thing that he could do because he's in a contract year and you don't pitch for four years, it's gonna be rough. It's been very cool to watch his progress and he had his first start, which was very successful,

about two weeks ago in spring training. Very cool. Very cool. To those that aren't be able to see the screen I pulled up just for the sake of conversation and we can talk about this individual, the different phases of pitching. And when we look at the arm, if you look at the arm cocking position on the screen, you're going to see when that's the arms and it's most externally rotated or exposed position.

That's when that ulnar collateral medial collateral ligament is under its most stress. This athlete, like really good pitchers, put a lot of stress there. And unfortunately, this pitcher ended up with a condition where he required surgery. In fact, two different surgeries to impact muscles and tendons and ligaments that are involved in that middle elbow. What we learned from the spring box scan, and I won't speak to the other stuff that's part of our take is there were other things that could have been optimized, like Dan would Dan would say you can't improve anything if you're dealing with a inflammatory response, like your inflammatory response stops

any acceleration, whether it be strength or recovery. But in this case, what we found on the springbok scan is some right hip instability indicated by some metrics that were presented by Springbok. And I show this picture because if he doesn't stand well, a right handed pitcher doesn't stand well on their right leg, their shoulder is in a vulnerable position from the start of the pitching motion. And so as we had the chance to talk to, I've had a chance to talk to this athlete and actually work with this athlete.

If we use the Springbok data and apply it, he gains more strength, more stability, more awareness, more understanding, all of the things that are essential for an athlete who has the aptitude and ambition to approve. Now that athlete is progressing through the reasons why he most likely had elbow pain The elbow pain goes away as a byproduct of improving the entire system the entire system being The human right like all of the factors related to the human and the physiology of the human. Yeah Is this something that I mean the the elbow surgery the Tommy Johns are Through the roof. It's almost like a normal thing in your career to have a really good start, a good Tommy John surgery,

take two years off, and then you come back stronger than pre-surgery. One, they're so good at the surgery now, but two, it seems so common. Is this something, if you were to put it into a pitcher's life when they're, say say in college, maybe even in high school, that you'd be able to see these movement flaws or these imbalances that are probably getting worse, you know, 0.1% a day or each session. And it's such a small amount of change happening in the

wrong direction that they never catch it until there's a real problem. Absolutely. And if we play our, you know, play the roles here as me as the springbok advisor, Doug is strength and conditioning, Andrew's you as medical. If you see an objective change in volume, or in this case, an increase in asymmetry

that is potentially correlated with reduction of pitching performance that we know is consistent based on a homogenous data set for elbow pain. We're not there yet, but I get into your comment, Doug, about trajectory. If we know that there's a consistent asymmetry, which we don't yet, to be very clear, we don't know that there's a consistent asymmetry pattern

that leads to Tommy John surgery. But if you start to see these objective metrics that indicate a worsening of asymmetries, or a trend in the wrong direction, now different people on the team strength conditioning, in your case, Doug Anders, in your case, medical, you guys can have this discussion about I'm working on shoulder external rotation stability. Doug, you're saying I'm working on physical force generation capacity.

And that would theoretically be a better, and in the case of the picture we're talking about, that's why I think his trajectory has changed. He went from a injured state to a potentially career ending position to now he's back starting and doing well and his trajectory is very much trending in the right direction. Again, referencing a trajectory here, AI is like the big topic around the world, of course. To what degree is there a possibility that Springbok will build in some type of AI pattern recognition system here where you can flag potential injuries well before they actually occur?

As an advisor, it's not as an advisor. It's not currently something that I am hearing them work on. I know the discussions are hard to, you can't, you can't refuse that AI is becoming more popular. And it seems like a logical progression to do exactly like you described, but right now Springbok is very focused on being this objective data, that we have a better understanding of larger groups of people. The thing that I get to do with RSA and the Rapid Health Program is really fun is we get to take that step, Doug, we get to actually take that step into understanding. And we haven't done this on enough pitchers in the case of this example player. But what we, I suspect we will have is a better understanding if a pitcher wanted to see where they're trending, positively or negatively, we can add that application layer, right, where we can give them that guidance and detail while utilizing technology, but not necessarily in a way that Springbok is currently doing. in a way that Springbok is currently doing. So I see a potential for that. I'd actually love to hear more thoughts on that and how you guys, right, how your program has considered that if

there's an opportunity to make the next step in this direction. Yeah, we don't have any AI specialists on the team at the moment. We certainly have the opportunity to do something like I just mentioned, but it's not currently on our to- to do lists and in the short term at least. But someone's eventually going to do that. And I feel like the whole world's heading that direction. So, you know, I'd say maybe in the next couple of years that ends up on our on our to do list. But it currently is not not the moment. You know, quick question, I was talking about this the other day with a friend. Is this being

used in bodybuilding at all? Given that bodybuilding asymmetry, or sorry, bodybuilding symmetry is so important to the sport and this tells you exactly how symmetrical you are or aren't looking purely at muscle mass with no body fat inhibiting the visibility. Are bodybuilders taking advantage of this? Especially as they're approaching competition, running this quarterly to see how their symmetry is looking pre-contest? We haven't had any true professional bodybuilders, people that have received their pro card use and do this. But shameless plug and total interest on my part, we just want to geek out. I think it's a phenomenal pathway for spring

buck to be applied. Right? If it if you can see a bodybuilding coach tell you that certain areas are underdeveloped, whether that be visually because of on stage posing, or just you're not able to do certain things that build your entire lower quarter. And let's go down. If an athlete, Andrews has always got a barbell rack behind him for squats, I think we can agree that squatting weight is going to create a stimulus to create a growth. And that could be a beneficial thing to the athlete. If you have a pattern that shows a reduction hypothetically of 10% reduced left glute, there's going to

be this moment where you have a non-smooth event during the squat. And I'm saying smooth because Andy, Andy Galpin, you guys, he mentioned that at the biomolecular conference that giving the cue to be smooth tends to help athletes think about their form in a better way than saying squat deeper, so to speak, or giving them too much information. If they could use this and say, wow, I need to be more focused on my left glute. Well, the recent perform podcast with Brett Contreras becomes a wealth of information where you can hit on different reps and set schemes, different forms of exercise that are focused solely on the glutes. But to the larger picture, it helps your squat depth. It helps your load literal ability to accept more load and drive more barbell

back squat strength. Yeah. Which then correlates into a growth, which then correlates into a more aesthetically pleasing posing mechanism. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how to get the price point to a point where you could do this like on a weekly basis and you could very quickly kind of like scroll, just like it's like scroll through through your photos like before and after picture style

where you could just see your muscles like like inflating and deflating depending on what your training stimulus is but having that kind of data as a professional bodybuilder would just be phenomenal. It would be amazing. We should you know we should talk to the Arnold right the Arnold Classic and just maybe maybe get Arnold, if Arnold's listening to this, a Arnold freestand from Springbok shameless plug there. But if we could start talking about how to make people more aware that this is their this this ability is there. I think once the interest is there, I

know Springbok is, you know, very nimble and always willing to support the creation of data sets, right populations to compare against. It'd be an incredible opportunity to understand how quickly a muscle changes. What stimulus is the best? I would love to see Brett Contreras run a one-e person sample size of different versions of glute training protocols based on things like anthropometric data. And that means like bone lengths, literally like height and bone lengths to the tip femur ratio during a squat. What creates the greatest growth, right growth in size, not necessarily completely indicative of strength. It'd be

amazing to have that data. Doug, we need to go back. Back to the glulab. Back to the glulab. I'm a huge fan of a huge Doug Goldstein has told us we need to go back to do work. May I join because I'm a huge fan of Brett his work is I mean I was glued to his book advanced. It was advanced gluteal training techniques. I was glued to it.

The EMG. My old Jim was like three blocks down the street from the glulab. Doug and I have some funny stories hanging out in there. We got to go in when nobody else is allowed, which is when the like pro bikini physique team is in there. And we tried to do a show, it just didn't go well. I was doing just fine. I had my back to the room so I could, I could focus. I'd be like, my fingers are from like, yo, focus, man.

Look at me. Eyes up. Eyes up. Yeah. Um, no, that would be, that would be very interesting. I would also love almost doing it sport by sport to seeing like one of the, one of the best books for getting the name of it right now. But it's like the science of sport. Is that right? Yes. Well,

they talk about and one of the things there's like a whole chapter on basketball. They talk about like your percentages of playing in the NBA. If you're six foot or basically zero, if you're six, three, it goes up by like like one percent something along those lines um then if you're like seven two you have like a 98 chance of playing in the mba like um and then i i always found it wild to understand like when a when a team puts on like when you hear the announcer say they're like they're playing small when they put their like their speedy short guys and then you run the actual science behind the antler, their body lengths, their arm lengths, and all that. And you realize nobody on the court is small at all.

It's actually like the long-armed shorter people are the ones that they consider to be the short, fast guys. But they're really the shorter, but extremely long. They don't lose any length on how high they can reach they just have extremely long arms and shorter bodies to make them a little bit quicker and I would love to it would be very interesting to see what data would come out if you were able to test kind of like all of the muscle of an entire sport of like what actually not just makes the hype so important but

What what on the muscular side of things is also going to play into like the science of that sport to actually make you very good at it it's I'm gonna bring up the University of Wisconsin because it seems wildly applicable. Yeah, They have a Brian Heiderscheid runs many things there for the school, but one of the things is this running laboratory. And one of their researchers underneath Brian Heiderscheid had mentioned that gate efficiency, so literally like your stride length, step length, measurements of how you move, the more symmetry you have there is more correlated to personal best times. So when we look at

running, running is, I think, pretty arguably one of the most or should be most symmetrical events in any sporting event that we do. You're doing left and right the same things. It's a linear sport where your legs should theoretically do similar activities. What we see in that is this increase in inefficiency. I've seen this with an athlete who is a Olympian, a long distance Olympian, and he had an asymmetry that as we started to, I the way that his body needs. He started to see these increases in times. And in fact, he took a very I won't say the ranks that kind of gives him away. At one of the best races in America, he took fifth place, which is an incredible

improvement and where he was, because the people he lost to were world, world champions, Olympic gold medalist, and he went from being exceptionally good to now he's in that upper echelon near podium level status. To those that can't see the screen, for Anders and Doug here, I purposely pulled up a rotational athlete. This is a PGA tour player.

Where exactly what I wanted to ask about next. It's completely different, right? There's minimal, there's a level of symmetry that is asymmetrical to be really good at golf. Whereas in running, we would expect muscles to be more closely to your margin of error comment, Anders, we would expect the grouping to be a little closer. I'm going to make a reference to, you know, your, my 40 year old, your 40 year old Seinfeld comment is my tin cup moment with golf, right? It's a finely tuned athlete on the verge of greatness.

But sometimes these athletes are so, well, finely tuned, but on the verge of chaos. And I always say this to athletes, the reason they're so good is they're comfortable walking that cliff. And the reason they're close to the cliff is because the asymmetries they've created by doing the sport that has an asymmetrical demand

is why they're good at what they do. They can load to the right better than they can uncoil to the left. Or they can absorb force in a way that does something you and I as a recreational golfer couldn't even dream of. Yeah. So this athlete here to the screen, you're going to see things like a right-handed golfer having a left hamstring that's 7% smaller in the biceps femoris, 7% smaller in the medial hamstring semimembranosus, a near 9% reduction. This athlete didn't have pain, mind you. This athlete is just built this way because of the demands of the sport require him to be built this way to perform at a high level. Yeah. So when you go to train this person though, built this way to perform at a high level. Yeah. So when you go to train this person, though,

what is the balance between knowing that they are a rotation, or they're not going to turn into a left-handed golfer? So you need them to be in that tightrope of being as strong in that position as possible, but also realizing we don't want to injure them by going too far. How is a strength coach kind of empowered through this system to make those decisions on what's too much and what's too little?

Because they're kind of walking the tightrope as well as someone that's like training them. I think that's where we're seeing teams be very intelligent about their usage of things like Springbok in baselining athletes. So I don't mean to say that this is the only portion of an athlete profile, but if you have an athlete who comes into the season is presenting in a certain way with certain asymmetries, I think a really important way to do this would be to have an athlete who is at near optimal levels. Let's say that they just won the Masters for the sake of golf.

This is they they're at the height of their career, they're doing great. It would be phenomenal to have that profile that literal objective data set at that moment. And then what they can do is basically look at exercises, they can look at performance and then it goes back to the other comment about layering. Right now in Springbok there's somewhat of my opinion again as an advisor I'm seeing a more reactionary approach to its usage where they're saying at time of injury get a scan but the problem is at time of injury is when they're most vulnerable or when they become injured.

Yeah. What if we flip that and we say, we want this athlete to have a scan at its optimal performance versus time of injury? Yeah. It doesn't exactly answer your question. Yeah, and there's probably a lot of the stuff that doesn't, like a hamstring is a much larger muscle than like a tennis player that's going to have.

I actually sat courtside one year and watched James Blake and Andy Roddick when Roddick was the man and like Roddick's forearms look like look like you should have been at the Arnold like it was he was so Jack and but then the rest of his body looked kind of like a runner and it was like the weirdest looking thing but your forearm is not going to cause injuries that are going to keep you out of a tennis match where if you're a golfer and you have a 10% discrepancy left or right hamstring, it's going to cause probably many issues like maybe what Tiger was dealing with with all the knee issues and low back issues he's had in his career. Yeah, exactly. So where this, I think I would say we need to change the aperture a little bit here and zoom out. And if the forearms are massively enlarged, right, they're, they're huge, because they're holding the racket, they're using it, they're manipulating the environment,

a billion reps, no matter how light they screen, I'll explain to the viewers. But when we look at that forearm, what other connections does it have to the rest of the body, right? That's where this term kinematic chain kinematic sequencing. How does that play? And I don't know this on Andy Roddick. But my assumption is, he probably had an incredibly strong core, right? He had an incredibly strong core that allowed him to transfer force. strong core, right? He had an incredibly strong core that allowed him to transfer force. Yeah, we know that certain muscles of your inner thigh, your adductors connect to your obliques, even though they're two totally different muscle groups in different regions, the ability to transfer force or or move force across the pelvic girdle requires more than just the core. Yeah. So Thomas Myers, to those that are listening Thomas Myers was a is very involved in the

facial understanding of the world. fascia being the connected tissue that connects things. I'm showing a picture of the superficial back line. And what you'll see here on the screen is the head epicranial fascia is completely connected to the plantar fascia. So that's where this understanding of Andy in his case was his forearm connected to, which it is, fascia to the pec major, to the latissimus dorsi. And I'm going to go a little further and say we know the latissimus dorsi on the right is connected to the left glute via the posterior sling. We know the glute on the

left and the hamstrings on the left have a relationship. Again, I'll stop there because it almost turns into this rabbit hole of unending search. Springbok is an opportunity for us to appreciate that more zoomed out perspective of where the body is. And then when you layer it again with good strength and conditioning, right, good recovery, good medical advice, good psychological training, right? All of these factors are what lead to performance, not one. But if there's a weak link in any of that chain, I think the old phrase works here, right? You're only as strong as your weakest link. But instead of saying you're only as strong as your weakest link, your performance is predicated by how non-weak links you have, right? If you have less weak links, your performance should be higher. Yeah.

You know, to what extent could it be expanded from purely muscle mass into, say, ligaments, as an example, where you could see like your AC on your left side is, you know, 5% less or has less five, sorry, five percent less volume than the ACL on your right side. Or I don't know if they really change size specifically, but could you see damage over time and that type of thing? Again, just using ligaments as one example of many. Yeah. I think it's not okay. I want to make sure I answer this correctly, because this goes back to a medical article where they looked at the size of a tendon. Right now, Springbok can measure the size of a tendon in volume.

Now there are certain tendons that are harder to visualize. I'll steer from that, but just know that the size of the tendon has a correlation to the injuries that the tendon has sustained. So in this case, it's not always a larger tendon is a more efficient tendon. It's a larger tendon is actually probably absorbed more load due to muscular inefficiencies. And that large increase in tendon size has a correlation through literature to tendonopathic pathology. So we can see athletes that have had, let's say a difference of, you know, a difference in volume left Achilles larger than right. And they'll tell you that the prior season they dealt with Achilles tendinopathy.

But if you zoom up into the calf, you can start to see that there's a reduction or an imbalance in muscle volume. Because we have to remember that muscles pull on tendons, tendons pull on bones. They're never independent of each other. In my mind, clinically, they always have to remember that muscles pull on tendons and tendons pull on bones. They're never independent of each other in my mind clinically, they always have to be correlated. Right. So if that tendon is absorbing too much force or is exposed and is in a vulnerable position, what can we do to the muscle that has a direct interaction to that tendon to potentially offload or to bolster the dissipation of ground reaction

forces that go through that area and that body. Yeah, muscle mass changes quickly over time, but other soft tissue structures, you know, you wouldn't be able to do it the same way. But I'm just wondering, this is all MRI data for the audience. Like, what other things do MRIs have visuals on or provide data for that also could be analyzed in a similar manner to provide context for future injuries and what have you? I don't have an answer.

I don't have an answer either. But I can say that the Springbok team is very clever. Their team is a their powerhouses, right? They're serious powerhouses in the ability to ask the next level question. And I think as we've a next level question is currently being answered is, what is the muscle volume objectively? What is the intramuscular flat? What is the relationship of those two to performance? I don't want to spoil what spring box working on, but there's definite advancements beyond muscle

volume and intramuscular fat, where they're actively pursuing deeper visualization, right? MRI machines are only going to become more precise over time. Right? There's, there's a seven T scanner in the world right now. Spring block operates on a 1.5 Tesla. When you increase that number, you're increasing the fidelity. New questions are asked.

New questions mean new information, new information hopefully leads to changes in, you're increasing the fidelity. New questions are asked new questions mean new information, new information hopefully leads to changes in pain states or performance, whatever the clinician or person is looking at. Dude, this has been really cool. And just an hour goes by and I'm even more bothered that I said no to the analysis that I turned down about two years ago. Where can people learn more about Springbok? And and you

go to springbok analytics.com if you want to read anything about Springbox, you know, information is all there. Me specifically, I work again, I get the pleasure of working inside of the rapid health and RSA program. So I would say reach out to them because they are truly the only group right now that is doing the applied side of spring buck because we have the ability in this case to, uh, not only ask the next level questions, but apply that information and see the changes. And we've got some really cool case studies that are showing some really cool

results right now. Yeah, I love it man. Doug Larson. You bet, I'm on Instagram. Doug, I see Larson. Doug, appreciate you coming on the show, man. I love having you on the team and Springbok, I just think is the coolest fucking company. So, I was really stoked to do this show and the results that it's helped to contribute with our athletes have been phenomenal. So, I appreciate you being here. Yeah, man, it's been really cool. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are Barbell Shrugged, barbell underscore shrugged to make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that you can see for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.